that-guy
Latest
Drama Mamas: When you realize you've become That Guy
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. Kudos to this week's letter writer for comprehending what his guild's problem is: him. I have a problem I haven't seen on DM before. First off let me say, I am the problem and I know it. I joined a raiding guild mid way through ToT as a tank and we progressed fairly well through it. As time went on and I grew more comfortable with them, a side of me emerged I have never seen before. I became more sensitive to what people said, impatient and just overall "jerky". Now the other night they raided, one shot all the normal bosses we would do and my guild leader said they sounded like they had fun because they didn't have to worry about upsetting me. This came as quite a shock. I didn't know people were walking on egg shells around me.
The 9 people you need to avoid in WoW
Almost five years ago, I wrote an article titled The 10 people you need to know in WoW. For some reason it never occurred to me to write a counterpart on the people you need to avoid. While I think these unpleasant folks are less important and influential than the people you actually want to have around, there's no denying that, once present, they can do a lot of damage to your ingame experience. If you haven't had at least one supremely frustrating experience yet as a result of the douche-nugget brigade, you are fortunate indeed. For the rest of us, some of the following players will be all too familiar.
The Daily Grind: Have you ever facerolled MMO content?
I've recently returned to World of Warcraft and was surprised to find a much more complex game than when I left (contrary to popular lore in our comments). Several of the classes have been revamped mechanically to be far more interesting and layered, and new dungeon encounters are frequently among the best in the industry. At endgame, anyway. I realize that outside of heroics and raids and PvP, WoW (like many MMOs) aims for accessible simplicity, which is nice when you're just happily grinding away or teaming up with weekend warriors not looking for a stressful challenge. One of my mates even bragged about facerolling his way through the dungeon finder, and I had to wonder, do people really do that? Even if content is easy, I still try to play it "right." I'll still make sure I know how to play my character, probably because I'm terrified of being that person in a PUG -- you know, the one who makes people hate PUGs. But I have to admit that the idea of honestly just punching whatever buttons just to see if we'll still win has its own amusing charm (and a strange level of challenge too). Have you ever facerolled MMO content, literally or figuratively? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
WoW Insider's BlizzCon 2011 Bingo
How would you like a bizarre unwieldy game to print out and carry around with you wherever you go while attending BlizzCon this year? You're in luck, because the WoW Insider staff has assembled this year's BlizzCon Bingo card! Print the image, take it with you to BlizzCon, and mark off the squares you experience first-hand. When you mark five boxes in a row, you win! What do you win? The greatest prize of all: absolutely nothing. How exciting! Let's be honest, here: Most of you are going to turn this thing into a drinking game. That's cool and all, but please, mind your health (and that of others) when you sit down Friday night and realize you've checked off nearly every square already. %Gallery-136981%
The Daily Grind: People still play that game?
You know the one. That one game. The one you quit since you're so ahead of the curve. The one with the dated graphics and the vintage writing and the mechanics from at least a bajillion decades ago. The one that treats polygons like a precious resource. The one that patched out the obvious perfection that was its launch state, rendering it wholly unplayable forevermore. The one clearly supplanted and bettered by every game since. You just can't believe anyone would stick around in a game so... old. And yet people do -- and they pay for the privilege! OK, even if you're not that guy -- the type who posts "people still play that game?" in every comment thread just to show how awesome he is -- there's still probably a game that makes you wonder who plays this stuff? So what's the one game you're shocked is still around? Every morning, the Massively bloggers probe the minds of their readers with deep, thought-provoking questions about that most serious of topics: massively online gaming. We crave your opinions, so grab your caffeinated beverage of choice and chime in on today's Daily Grind!
Drama Mamas: It's time for That Guy again
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. Monday is a good day for drama, don't you think? Dear Drama Mamas, I'm in a small dilemma. I'm in a guild I've been raiding with since the last six months of Wrath or so. At the time, I helped to pull them out of a rut with Sindragosa and make an LK kill possible. [...] Now with Cata in full swing, I'm feeling a little undervalued as a pally healer. It's not my GM and his wife (who tends to co-lead), who are wonderful, amazing people. It's this relatively new-to-guild player who is a friend of an officer's irl. Since having to adapt to class changes with Cataclysm, I've had to undergo what looked like a lot of retraining, IE: my healing output changed drastically, not to mention I was compared to our other pally healer and fell far short. Now that I'm back on my game so to speak, I'm doing fine. Sometimes accidents happen though, and sometimes I make mistakes. I apologize, do better and we profit. I will say I haven't wiped a boss we had on farm. [...]
Drama Mamas: Vent troubles vs. That Guy
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. The above video is not on topic. Anyway, let's talk about That Guy. He's always causing drama. Or is he? Dear Robin and Lisa, I recently found myself in an interesting situation: Running our guild second 10 man raid team. Or more accurately, finishing it off with two tanks, a healer and a DPS. Getting the DPS and the healer was fairly easy without going outside the guild or recruiting anyone. And I even convinced one of our officers to be the MT. This afternoon, at the spur of the moment, he (the MT guild officer) formed a Bastion of Twilight raid with most of the second team members in it, including me (shammy healer), along with a tank friend of his. So, we get there, join vent, mine is working fine (this is important) and we start the first pulls, things are going just fine and we get to the first boss. Halfus has 3 drakes available (twilight, slate and time) so after a short discussion in vent, a strategy is decided on and we attack the boss. Three wipes later, they down the boss, my first ever kill on Halfus. I even get this amulet drop which is a huge upgrade for me, so I am happy.
Drama Mamas: Is That Guy abusive or obsessed?
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm. First of all, I would like to thank this week's letter writer for the signature that allows me to embed one of my favorite songs of all time. Secondly, I would like to remind you that if you wrote in and your email got answered, you can be included in our roundup column by sending in an update on what happened in your situation to DramaMamas@wow.com. And thirdly, well, there is no thirdly. Let's get right to it. Dear Drama Mamas, About a year ago, I found out that one of my real-life coworkers and her husband played WoW with their in-laws. I was excited! The server I was on no longer had any of my friends on it, as they had either quit or transferred. So I bit the bullet and moved to this new server. Things were going great! We raided, PVPed, quested, and crafted together -- all five of us. We were the perfect 5-man team and never met a dungeon that we couldn't beat together.
Drama Mamas: The curious case of That Guy vs. the Spineless Jellyfish GM
Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. Once upon a time, there was a guild member called That Guy. That Guy was typical of his kind -- abrasive in guild chat, incompetent in raids, seemingly without redeeming value ... Except that the guild always seemed to need him in order to scrape together a full raid group. His GM, the usual enemy of all That Guys in their natural habitat, turned out to be a subspecies that posed no threat to That Guy at all: the Spineless Jellyfish GM. To the horror of guild members, not only did Jelly-Belly do nothing to solve the chaos created by That Guy, but he actually wrapped his tentacles around That Guy and laughed in glee as the guild spun more and more rapidly into a vortex that threatened to suck them all into the briny depths ... Dear Drama Mamas, I am in a 25-man raiding guild on a server. We are a decent group of raiders. We have every raiding stereotype you can imagine: the yelling raid leader, the cool-as-a-cucumber DPS, and the always-has-a-strat guy, just to name a few. So as you can see, we are a typical group trying to climb to the top of the server ranking. I have been in this guild since a month after Ulduar released and I have gotten into the flow of people leaving, joining and quitting the game. It felt homey until 5 months ago, when problems started to arise. I have been having drama with one person -- not run-of-the-mill drama, either. Recurring drama.
Drama Mamas: That Guy
Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with the Drama Mamas. Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are real-life mamas and experienced WoW players -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. We're taking your questions at DramaMamas (at) WoW (dot) com. We all come across That Guy both in-game and in person. That Guy is a bit overzealous while watching sports, picks fights at parties and/or verbally abuses people when things go wrong in a raid. That Guy is the one who thinks emulating Tokyo Rose during Alterac Valley games is a good thing. In general, That Guy can be avoided or ignored, but what if your Significant Other turns into That Guy whenever he ventures into Azeroth? Feels Single In Game writes in about this very phenomenon.
Five tips to minimize raiding downtime
I'm a rather avid raider, putting in a solid 20 hours a week on my Warrior. One of the major things about the time spent raiding is that it can be very precious. There is only so much time that 24 other people, plus appropriate class substitutions, can be available each week. It's critical that the time spent raiding is used well.Unfortunately, using raiding time well is about as much of a challenge as is downing Illidan. In preparation for this article, I've spent the past three weeks keeping track of the down time in raids. We raid Sunday through Thursday nights, from 7:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. We experience a downtime of about 51 minutes for each raid, which is about 20% of the time. Down time is defined as the time that my character is standing still, not attacking, not moving, and not being MDed to.Is this a good thing or a bad thing? I'm not really sure. Tip #1: Chain pullingPersonally, I do my best at the main tank to chain pull and push the trash through as fast as possible. This works out 99% of the time, however the 1% of the time it doesn't work out can grind the raid to a halt. Case and point: The trash to Supremus isn't too bad, and is a lot of packs where the MT, OT, and Pally tank each have some mobs to tank. There are also some ranged dragons that the Warlocks tank. These pulls can go very fast, and are very predictable. Pulling slowly we can do this in about 40 minutes, while chain pulling each group, we can push through in 15.Tip #2: Fully self buffed, all the timeIt doesn't take much to buff yourself. Every class has some buff they can apply to themselves, be it food buffs, spell buffs, or shouts. The key here is that you can find a minute or two to always buff at least yourself, if not others. Although, it might not always be possible to buff others as you're going along - and that's okay with most raid leaders for trash pulls.
